Mobile users are different to the home worker and they're all different to a branch worker, so how do you find out what they need and give it to them effectively.
Finding out what end users want from their desktop and comparing it to what you think they need can be a sobering experience. Performance, fast access to data and …

COMMENTS

I've gone blind...

For starters, users would be much happier with better compatibility.

Take the myriad of audio and video formats that are around. Talk about a pain in the arse, only a fraction of these are really necessary to do everything one wants. Moreover, there's seeming countless CODECs around to service these formats. Anyone who has tried to sort out the mess let alone optimise a CODEC's parameters knows full well the phrase 'DLL hell' has been replaced with 'CODEC hell'.

Fuck-ups of this kind happen when governments let patents and copyrights get out of hand of hand--mathematical algorithms and such weren't supposed to be patentable/copyrightable but somehow it has happened.

There are so many 'standards' that effectively we have no standards. And who ultimately pays? Right, the poor long-suffering user with his lost time, productivity and money.

What's even more depressing is that where we need new unified industry-wide standards there are none or they are simply neolithic. For example, a file standard that includes a vastly expanded metadata component which would allow metadata to be transmitted with the data from one O/S to another or across communication networks is desperately needed. There's many more wanting like this.

The problem is users are not complaining en mass or walking still with their dollars in their pockets. Simply, there's no incentive for manufactures to do anything when there's little or no demand.